During recent years, the demands placed on the programmable control instruments of control, test or measurement have been increased significantly. They have grown significantly the requirements in term of number of entries and exits, speed acquisition and processing capacity. In addition, the requirement to process a large amount of data in real time, the need to adapt such processing is attached to various specific applications with the same hardware platform and many times in a very short time. FPGA technology (‘field-programmable gate arrays’, in English ‘field) (programmable gate array’) provides a very promising alternative to deal with these challenges, given its character, reconfigurable and high processing capacity. However, for implementing the settings needed for the proper operation of the instruments control, test and measurement, so need an advanced knowledge of logical hardware, as highly specialized for FPGA, reaching design tools define physical interconnections and internal signal propagation times. This makes for implementing FPGA-based systems is required subject matter experts and the times of deployment and implementation of these systems are also very long even for expert users. Control, test and measurement systems require the benefits that offer the FPGA but need that its use and implementation is underway fast and simple as possible without forcing the user to be a programming expert hardware.
Some commercial solutions provide hardware that allows applications control, test and measurement that include an FPGA and provide the user a package with a draft framework—framework, English—software tool provided by the manufacturer of the FPGA included in the instrument. This project framework includes the necessary components to interact with the fixed hardware of the computer and the user can modify it to add the features you want. The problem with these systems is that requires experts in FPGA that usually is not the case of the for control, test and measurement engineers, and also development and commissioning times they are very long which much also limits its application to control, test and measurement. In order to simplify the process, there are some graphical tools that allow deploy code more easily FPGA, but not be designed for no instrument specific, still requiring complex interactions for your implementation on hardware of each particular, being typically instrument necessary to resort to the software tools provided by the manufacturer of the FPGA included in the instrument and use some project framework as in the previous case. I.e., These graphical tools do not include native implementation on trade instruments, which is a very complex task and suffers from drawbacks similar to those described for the above solution.
Other solutions provide modular instruments including an FPGA and a specific software to set these instruments, consisting in an environment of graphic programming that adapts a software based programming language in loops, conditionals, etc, to programming FPGA hardware. The graphical tool of high level allows you to simplify the process of programming of the FPGA hardware for the user, but at the expense of a reduction in performance due to a lower chance of optimization compared with a programming made with advanced tools. In addition the mechanism of software hardware-oriented programming presents serious disadvantages that according to the use that the user usually result in a use very deficient of the FPGA.
In all cases mentioned during the customization process of the hardware instrument user FPGA is implemented completely all the logic of the FPGA, and this occurs whenever the user changes any functionality by min that is. This added to the limited capacity of optimization of a user not expert, it seriously compromises the efficiency and performance of functions included in the libraries of the manufacturer and developed additional functions by the user. Also for this reason, times of compilation and implementation of the instrument can be prohibitively long. In short, there is still the need on the State of the art of a method and system hardware configuration of programmable control instruments, test and measure, which allows you to dynamically configure such instruments in a simple way and optimized, without having specific knowledge of FPGA and reducing the wait times associated with changes in the locale.